Texas Rangers baseball and more, by Scott Lucas

February 27, 2011

The Annual Bewilderment

Come the regular season, Washington intends for Beltre to hit fourth with Cruz fifth. The reason: Washington simply doesn't believe Cruz, entering what should be his third full season in the majors, is ready for the job.

"Wherever Beltre hits, whether it's fourth or fifth, I think he's still going to get the same pitches, a lot of offspeed stuff away and then fastballs in," Washington said. "He's a veteran and he can handle that. I just don't think [Cruz] is ready for it. One more year, I think he might be." [emphasis added]

"The No. 4 guys gets off-speed stuff," Washington said on Monday. "Look back and Milton [Bradley] handled more off-speed stuff than fastballs. Hamilton handled more fastballs than breaking balls because they didn't want to put Hamilton on base and let Milton hurt them."

Ah... we've been down this road before. As I wrote back in '08, Bradley actually saw more fastballs than all but one Ranger, while Hamilton saw the second lowest percentage of fastballs on the team. Which is to say, Washington was completely, utterly backwards.

As for the latest assertion, Cruz already sees more offspeed pitches than most batters. In 2010, Cruz received more offspeed pitches than the league median, more than Adrian Beltre, and many more than last year's cleanup hitter Vlad Guerrero. Pitchers just don't like bringing the heat to him:

Player

Offspeed %

Rank

Cruz

45.4%

19th

Beltre

43.3%

34th

AL Median

41.6%

--

Guerrero

40.2%

62nd

Based on 97 AL batters with 400+ plate appearances

Does Cruz struggle against breaking pitches? He certainly didn't in 2010 (data compiled from Fangraphs):

Player

Batting Runs per 100 Offspeed Pitches

Rank

Batting Runs per 100 Non-Knuckled Offspeed Pitches

Rank

Batting Runs per 100 Fastballs

Rank

Cruz

1.24

6th

0.74

16th

1.85

7th

Beltre

0.97

13th

0.97

11th

1.05

21st

AL Median

(0.12)

--

(0.13)

--

0.27

--

I created a "non-knuckleball breaking pitch" category because: 1) batters so rarely face them, and 2) Cruz destroyed Tim Wakefield (5-5, 2 doubles, homer, walk) such that a large percentage of his breaking-ball value came against Wakefield alone. Beltre exceeds Cruz in this category, but not by much. In sum, Cruz hits well regardless of what's coming at him.

Batting order doesn't matter much, except at the extremes of optimization and silliness, so sitting Cruz behind Beltre means very little in terms of runs scored. Still, I wish Washington would stick to an emotion-based explanation that people can abide ("I'm more comfortable with a veteran batting cleanup. The end.") and omit the technical reasoning that contradicts the facts.